


Anathema

by Stidean



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alone, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Feels, M/M, Maimed characters, Major Character Injury, Major character death - Freeform, Mycroft Being a Good Brother, Orlando - Freeform, Separations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 09:34:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/860624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stidean/pseuds/Stidean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"John eventually made his way into the bathroom, just after sunset, slowly, in order to avoid the stubbing of his toes. It was eerily calm and silent. He stood outside, his face pressed against the cool door for a few seconds. Without turning on the light-switch, he walked in, closed the door behind him, approached the sink in the darkness, braced himself against the porcelain, took the bandage off his left eye, and pulled on the cord of the overhead light fixture."</i>
</p><p>Sherlock loses John and they move on.<br/>Sherlock runs into John and they discuss what they didn't discuss a year earlier.<br/>Sherlock loses John and doesn't move on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anathema

**Author's Note:**

> I was rather cruel with this one. Just a fair warning.  
> I posted it a few days ago and it just didn't sit well with me. I changed it, hopefully for the better.

_There can be no doubt about his sex, despite the slight feminine appearance that every fashionable young man of our times aspires to. And there can be no doubt about his upbringing: good food, education, a nanny, loneliness and isolation._

_And, because this is England, Sherlock would therefore seem destined to have his portrait on the wall, and his name in the papers. However, when he came into the world, Sherlock was looking for something else. Though heir to a name that meant power, land and property, surely when Sherlock was born, it wasn’t privilege and advancement he sought, but puzzles._

The same, however, could not be said about his brother, who seemed to be the model of all that was expected of him and more. They had trodden the same path at one time, but diverged rather quickly and violently, and their temperaments made any current similarities between them an absurdity (a fact which they both enjoyed affirming to themselves each time they crossed paths). One thing, if the brothers will permit it to be recorded, which they still do share and willingly acknowledge, is decisiveness, and an antipathy for those who would require them to show regret over the consequences of their made decisions; their intelligence and their ability to calculate all consequences in advance, make any reproach to be considered an insult towards their mental capacities.

It is this fraternal decisiveness which John’s mind was dwelling on, his fear amounting, as Sherlock took aim towards the other side of the room, to the spot where the soon to be evaporated bomb-vest, landed, just before Moriarty’s changeable reappearance. He emerged again, goaded Sherlock (for there can be no other word which could be used to describe what he had done, if we are truly to believe that Moriarty and Sherlock possess the same mind and knew full well which course of action would be left to him) and left the genius with no other choice. Sherlock knows John; he knows John agrees. As loath as he is to think, in what could be the last seconds of his life, about his brother’s idea of the ‘Greater Good’, he knows John. Knows that the soldier agrees with that sentiment, and getting this result, right now, when they have the chance to end this threat, is worth their lives.

Half a second after Moriarty’s phone rang, and Sherlock missed the chance of appreciating how ridiculous a sound it would have made, Sherlock prepared himself to take the consequences of his actions, as he has always done, and took his shot.

Though not as catastrophic an explosion as the one which had taken a dozen lives after the Connie Prince case, the detonation still ripped the building in half (the pool taking the majority of the caved-in roof), killing Moriarty (who had designed the vest to appear much more menacing and powerful than it actually was) and causing severe wounds to Sherlock and John: Beyond the garden-variety type of life-threatening bruises, scrapes, cuts and lacerations, which usually come from surviving an explosion of that magnitude, Sherlock lost three digits from his right hand, the hand which had been holding the gun, and John had lost the use of his left eye due to some high-velocity debris which had caught him just an instant after the detonation. They were found almost crushed against the opposite wall of the complex, the shockwave sending them flying there. Sherlock’s main bodily harm, besides the loss of his fingers, came from the metal frame of the locker he had crumpled as his back hit it, a threat to the wellbeing of his spine and his future mobility. For John, besides the loss of his eye, it was the impact of the explosion on his stomach which posed a significant threat to his major organs.

The snipers were never tracked; no blue and red lights flashed across their faces, as they kneeled hidden within distant alcoves which were surrounding the swimming complex. The police were not aware there was a need for searching them out. But it made no difference. They had severed their loyalties as soon as it was obvious Moriarty was no longer alive or was unlikely to be of any use to them as an employer, so there was no fear of retribution from them. Moriarty was malignant, and malignancy commanded respect and fear, not loyalty, and certainly not affection.

Paramedics were quick on the scene. Too quick, but that was to be expected.

Recovery was long and arduous, for both of them. Sherlock seemed eager to leave even before it was even marginally reasonable, medically speaking, to do so. John… seemed oddly unwilling to leave. It took him two months, which was spent with a haze of faces. Among them was a blurred Harry “any-excuse-to-drink” Watson, a distraught Sarah, a solemn Mycroft, a faux-cheerful Lestrade, a quiet Molly (‘guilt doesn’t suit her’), a fretting Mrs. Hudson and even a proud Sally Donovan.

Drugs took care to numb everything to a point of constant exhaustion, but the nights were terrible. As soon as he could get out of bed, he wandered a little, but never straying too far from his own room. All hospitals look a bit alike to those who work in them long enough. They all have nurses’ stations, which are the best place to get a decent cup of coffee (not from the stuff provided by the administrators themselves, goodness no), if you are kind and polite enough, a nurse might supply you with a brew she brought from home. They all have a casualty unit, which is quieter than you would think, on most nights. They all have hallways wide enough to ride a tank through. It wasn’t fear of getting lost which prevented John from straying. He was just tired of the unexpected, and hospitals are full of the unexpected; and so was his own life, now. Though he felt repulsed by the idea, towards the end of his stay, John had to admit he was scared: if life without excitement was slowly killing him, and life with his main source of excitement was slowly AND quickly killing him, where was his choice?

John did eventually make his way back to 221B and, after convincing Harry to take a cab home without stopping in (she had insisted on being the one to accompany him after he was released from the hospital, and he was thankful to find her sober when the time came), he climbed the stairs slowly, dreading the state he would find Sherlock. He had barely seen him during his hospital stay, which John had attributed to Sherlock’s unwillingness to deal with sentiment of any kind, let alone guilt for having pulled them into Moriarty’s spider’s web just to feel the elation which comes after puzzle solving (‘one addiction for another’). Surely it wasn’t because of squeamishness at having to see the wounded Doctor and his ocular injury; Sherlock had seen far worse during his lifetime of morgue visits and his penchant for inflicting wounds on cadavers just to assuage his curiosity.

All he could think of, as he climbed the stairs, was the exchange that had taken place between them during Sherlock’s one and only visit. And now, John had no choice and could delay their meeting no further.

But it seemed he could.

For, though he was certain he had relayed, through Mrs. Hudson, the date of his release, Sherlock had apparently not gotten the message. John would have asked Mrs. Hudson herself, whether she had indeed forgotten, but didn’t want to exert himself any further by descending and re-ascending the stairs, nor was he willing to make the dear old woman feel like a simpleton by reminding her she had forgotten to deliver such an important piece of information to Sherlock. He found the flat empty. It was different than all the other times he had come home and found Sherlock missing. He felt abandoned. The light steaming in from outside and onto the living room’s furnishings was pale, insufficient; the air was stale. The kitchen… he could never keep track of how the kitchen was SUPPOSED to look. Too many subtle, and not so subtle, changes were constantly made by Sherlock. He didn’t venture into any other room. His own required climbing stairs, and Sherlock’s was never a room he much ventured into.

John decided to put the state of the flat out of his mind and sat himself down to wait for the sun to set. It was only just after 4 P.M. so John spent his time, while waiting, doing nothing; absolutely nothing.

Though there were many reflective surfaces to be used in the hospital, and enough mirrors in the bathrooms, John had avoided all of them completely and remained in the dark regarding his own face’s marred flesh (‘… another scar…’) and empty eye socket (he was going to be fitted with a glass eye in a few weeks’ time, by a specialist Mycroft had recommended). He had been taught how to clean the wound; how to avoid having the runoff accumulate and how to notice if things were going wrong. He was a doctor, to be sure, but had no detailed experience with eye injuries, beyond the basic information needed for the battlefield.

John eventually made his way into the bathroom, just after sunset, slowly, in order to avoid the stubbing of his toes. It was eerily calm and silent. He stood outside, his face pressed against the cool door for a few seconds. Without turning on the light-switch, he walked in, closed the door behind him, approached the sink in the darkness, braced himself against the porcelain, took the bandage off his left eye, and pulled on the cord of the overhead light fixture. There was a hole in his face; a cave of flesh. The sight was horrifying. He congratulated himself rather too quickly on his composure and, after a minute or so, a sob (or was it a whimper?) escaped him, then another. Half an hour later, he was seated in the bath with the shower spray dousing his skin, his head bowed. Every few minutes he hit the sides of the tub with all his strength but showed no other signs of losing his composure, and, at length, long after the hot water gave way to warm, tepid, cold and finally freezing water, John heard the front door open and close quickly, which was a trademark Sherlockian entrance. ‘He is on a case… thank goodness I didn’t bother Mrs. Hudson.’

Five months later, John no longer lived at 221B.

Unlike everything else since moving in with Sherlock, it happened gradually. John made one excuse after the other for why he couldn't accompany Sherlock on investigations, which Sherlock could have obviously seen through and yet, oddly enough, never tried to, by reasoning them away. John started making his excuses more and more ridiculous, almost to test Sherlock, but he never took the bait. He felt angry at Sherlock. ‘Call me a liar, you twat!’ he kept thinking at the back of his mind every single time. ‘Make this easier on me’ was what he never allowed himself to think. He wondered if anyone from the Met had made any comment on John’s absence; ‘Maybe a joke from the “Psychopath-Brigade”, about Sherlock having finally snapped and killed me.’

Eventually, John ran out of steam and started looking for another flat closer to the surgery. He deliberately left the newspaper lying about with potential flats circled, some of them he wasn’t even interested in and were quite out of his price range, hoping Sherlock would at least point that out. Sherlock never did. He was out of 221B more often than before, and had stopped asking John to accompany him. The strangest thing of all was the presence of Mycroft in the flat from time to time. John never listened in on the conversations, so he had no way of knowing their content, though he was curious enough.

A month or so had passed since the last time he was asked to join in on an investigation, and John realized one day that they had stopped talking altogether at a certain point. It was the realization that he hadn’t noticed, that hurt him the most, and a week and a half later he was moving his things while Sherlock was at Bart’s morgue. He thought about leaving a note but realized it would be meaningless as soon as he looked at the fridge for a magnet to pin it to. There was no shopping list attached, as there always was (sometimes with items that would have alarmed the authorities if they were watching, which they were, but they knew well enough what to expect from their own sibling), which meant Sherlock was, as always, already in the know. John didn’t leave a note.

Nearly a year went by and John heard sirens from the street near his flat, on the afternoon of one of his days off. His curiosity, and a touch of nostalgia, beckoned him to the scene and he found Sally, who was standing on the public side of the police tape which was cordoning off the entrance to the flat which was being investigated. She was heading the case, apparently.

Pleasantries (or as close as you come to them when standing near a house containing a corpse), which he spent skirting around the subject of Sherlock and had more to do with his health, what he was doing these days, how he adjusted to his cyclopean existence, how the doctor, whom Mycroft had recommended, taught him to no longer shift his eyes to look around but move his head instead, and so beguile people by not making it obvious that one of his eyes didn’t actually move. These ‘pleasantries’ were quickly put out of the way and John decided to assuage his curiosity on what the police was actually doing there.

“So, any good reason you woke half the street from a Sunday nap, Sally?”

“We've got an ‘is it/isn’t it’ situation, so we called in a specialist.”

“Where does the confusion come from?

“A pool of water underneath the hanging body. She was found by her cleaning lady.”

“Where’s Anderson to tell you it’s 'a simple suicide. Case closed!’?”

“No idea. Not working with Anderson. As I said, I called in a specialist.”

It was at that moment that Sherlock pushed through the crowd and lifted the tape to make his way in, saying nothing to nobody.

“Heya, Freak. She’s in there.” Sherlock made no response and seemed to avoid looking in their direction completely.

“HE’S your specialist? I thought that now that you’re finally handling investigations on your own, you’d insist on ‘doing things properly’... Oh... but since you’re a woman, and therefore advancement is twice as hard, getting results has become much more important than doing what you always claimed you would do, which is to keep him out.”

“Don’t give me that. My promotion has made me see things differently. And besides...” Sally seemed reluctant to continue.

“What… what is it?”

“I don’t know.” She took a small pause. “There’s something different. Him trying to take down Moriarty… I’m not stupid. I know why he did it. It could easily be argued that he did it because he just didn’t want there to be two of him, maybe jealous of Moriarty’s talent, though they were quite obviously a true match for wits. But Sherlock could have easily joined him; taken the offered opportunity for more interesting puzzles. He killed him because it was right; because it was the right thing to do. When Anderson argued differently I turned my back on him… no pun intended.” She added with a smile. “Same day I came to visit you both.”

“What?”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“No. We ah… we didn’t talk much after.”

“It’s not as if we had a long talk about feelings; more of a ‘Good Job. See you around, Freak’.”

“And with this newfound outlook, you still call him that?”

“Well,” she said with a smile “old habits die hard. Besides, don’t wanna seem TOO eager for his help.”

“You do realize this is Sherlock. He knows.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t mind it so long as he’s not too smug about it. Oh, wait… Yeah. No such luck with him.”

“It was the abusive Ex-husband.” Sherlock startled them both, as he pulled the latex gloves off his hands and handed them to Sally. “You’ll find he’s with the kids right now. It’s his Sunday with them. Long and ugly custody battle; she was winning, of course, but ugly none the less, which gives her a possible motive to kill herself, but she didn’t. He came by to pick them up; put them in the car, asked them to wait while ‘Mummy and Daddy have a little chat’ and went back inside with a large bag, made of some heavy material, which was most likely soaked at the bottom, dripping profusely. There are water stains on the wooden floors that lead from the entrance to the room upstairs where she was found. He incapacitated her or maybe forced her with a gun to climb on the ice block, which he brought in the bag with him; after making her take some kind of oddly compiled drug: strong enough to prevent her from lifting her arms and taking the noose off her neck, but not strong enough to completely incapacitate her, knocking her out completely and causing her to die prematurely... hm, worth checking up. Oh, and obviously whoever made it, and I doubt it was him, is accessory to the murder, so get that sorted while you're at it. In any case, as I was saying, he incapacitated her that way, since he can’t tie her hands and can’t leave her to just take the noose off as soon as he leaves, put the noose around her neck, or forced her to do it just for the thrill of torturing her. He went back to the car and took the kids to whatever he got planned for their afternoon. No use kidnapping them, obviously. It would just arouse suspicion and waste a good murder. Better to act normal, and leave the courts with no choice but to grant him custody of the kids. She dies hours after he left, as the ice melts and tightens the noose further and further, and he has an alibi for the time of death, while the pool of water can be easily explained as a burst pipe or some such. He knew the schedule the cleaning lady kept, so he knew she would be found by someone, eventually, and so he wouldn't have to deal with the mess when he drops off the kids. Odd for a cleaner to work on a Sunday but she was new and it was the only day the victim had free to spend at home while she was there. Oh, by the way, the husband’s desperate, so make sure to arrest him quickly and leave him no opportunity to do something crazy. Better to ask him to the station for questioning and then arrest him rather than the other way around. If he even sniffs danger as you approach him, you can say goodbye to your chance of saving his children.”

Sherlock walked away and left John speechless. He realized it had been a long time since he felt the rush which Sherlock’s deductions usually cause within him. He also couldn’t help noticing that Sherlock had gained just a tiny bit of weight, making him look healthier. Contrary to popular belief, when Sherlock said that eating was tedious, he meant eating during a case. And sleeping, and showering, and anything else people do on a daily basis. But after Sherlock feels the elation that always came after a particularly difficult puzzle was solved, there were always a few blissful hours and, on one or two occasions, even days, in which John didn’t have to take care of Sherlock, by reminding him to eat or sleep. One time, this spirit of ‘normalcy’ had taken such a strong hold, Sherlock did the shopping. He didn’t buy anything of use, but it was still considered a valiant effort by John.

John wondered with a sickening feeling, whether he had been replaced by someone better equipped at either taking care of Sherlock or extending those few hours of ‘normalcy’ into days, on a regular basis. He needed to remind himself that he had left out of his own volition, which was when he realized that he hadn’t. Sherlock had made him leave, in the kindest way possible: by making it John’s decision. He had distanced himself and left John nothing that made staying appealing for him, and he had done it slowly, since an abrupt change would have grabbed his slowwitted mind’s attention.

He ran towards him after giving a quick ‘goodbye and good luck’ to Sally. Sherlock was waiting for a cab, looking smug as he always did just after a case which was quickly and easily solved.

“No, John. You have not been replaced.”

“Right… guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“Never stopped you before.”

“So… How have you been?”

“Small talk? Really?”

“Alright. Why did you make me leave?”

“Figured it out, have you? Was it the weight gain that triggered it?”

“The weight-gain made me think about being replaced, which made me…”

“… Jealous, which made you feel guilty since you were the one that wanted to leave, which made you reevaluate our last 5 months together, which led you to be standing here, asking me why I did it.”

“So, you’ve been living at Mycroft’s all this time, and he’s the one that has been keeping you healthier than you have been during our time living together. And you were living with him while I was at the hospital, which is why the air was stale in the flat when I first came in after being released from the hospital. Not something most people remember but… that first day stuck in my mind, for various reasons. Mrs. Hudson never mentioned you living somewhere else because she thought you were spending your nights at the hospital, and you never mentioned it because you’re a twat.”

“I only did what was right for you, John. The altercation at the pool should never have happened; you should not have been roped into my world and gain new scars just for the dubious privilege of being insulted by me on a daily basis.”

“And what I said at the hospital? Did that enter into your calculations?”

“Why should you coming to that particular realization have changed my opinion on the subject?”

“Sherlock. Do you not care that I fell in love with someone incapable or unwilling to return those feelings? Did you think I only said it because I was in fear for my life at the time? Moriarty said he would burn the heart out of you. That was me, wasn’t it? That was when you realized I was your weak spot. You see, I have changed. You spend enough time with someone, you start thinking like them. You had to put me aside: you could either care for me and risk my death or lose me and be content that I am still alive.”

“And what if I did? Realizing it changes nothing, and stating it changes even less.”

“I would have risked it, you know? Risked keeping my life of uncertainty. For you, I would have.”

“And that’s why it’s best to leave things the way they are.”

“God, Sherlock… you know, I read a book once…”

“Have you? So very interesting…”

“Will you just shut the fuck up for once? The book begins with the Great Frost, during the early 1600s’. The main character waits for a girl on a bridge overlooking the frozen Thames. There was a loud crack and the Thames began to splinter to pieces; into icebergs. People at that time used the Thames as people use regular land, since the ice was so incredibly thick, and people didn’t consider what would happen once the frost would end. As if they considered change to be permanent, and gave no thought to the possibility that it might revert back to how it was before. The character sees, in horror, how people are trapped on the icebergs. Dead if they stay on them, dead if they leave them. The narrator makes a comment on how the most wretched, are those that have to face their deaths alone, since no one is on their tiny, icy islands with them; the ones that are sitting or kneeling or standing, their arms reaching madly, as if to grab onto something that just isn’t there. Now, was it an anchor they were reaching out for, or was it another person with which to share their deaths? Which would you have reached for, Sherlock? I guess it doesn’t matter, does it? Death comes to us all, and we usually have no say on the manner of it. But you do. Now, you do. Congratulations, Sherlock: just one more thing to be right about; to be in control of.”

“Fascinating. You love me. I… You love me. I want to die alone. Is that the point you’re so painfully trying to make?”

“You can’t even say it. Jesus Christ, Sherlock!”

“I have to get home.”

“You do that. Oh, and by the way, you look fat.”

Of course, Sherlock didn’t, but John was desperate to hurt him and could think of nothing. Calling him ‘stupid’ would be preposterous. ‘Ugly’ was just as idiotic. ‘Juvenile’ and ‘immature’ he had covered countless of times while they lived together. ‘Unfeeling’ and ‘uncaring’ had been firmly established by now as untrue, just not towards a great many people. But hell, even Sally might enter into the category of ‘Do give a tiny crap about’ in Sherlock’s catalogue. There was only ‘fat’ left. An absurd suggestion, one which prompted Sherlock to answer: “No I’m not.” Infuriating man.

When death came for John, just 3 months after, he was alone, or as alone as you can be in an alley close to a busy street. John was stabbed on his way back from the surgery: a senseless, drug-addled, mugging. He passed by a little cornershop he sometimes frequented, run by an aging Pakistani man, which had an ancient arcade machine that no longer worked but was still left to run all the time. John became distracted at the thought of that old man, not realizing that the broken images on the screen were not part of the demo but rather signified that the machine was either in dire need of repair or needed to be disposed of, and how sad it was that he will never understand, unless told, that the machine will never be played with, even if he were to be made aware of the fact that the game was broken and had it fixed, since kids had no use for those types of games anymore.

When John was only just finished with this sad little observation, he was jumped from his left side, knocked out, dragged into the alley, stabbed repeatedly and left for dead.  
Sherlock found the culprit fast enough, thanks in part to his homeless network. He killed the 19 year old drug addict with his own hands and used all his skills in making the body disappear. He could count on the Met’s incompetence, to put John’s mugging in the “random mugger that can’t be traced” pile, and trust even further that he would never be asked to take the case himself and so spare him the need to bungle the investigation to keep himself in the clear.

John’s life stopped, and in a sense, so did Sherlock’s. After moving back to 221B, he no longer took cases, no longer took care of himself, no longer did anything but go from the bed, to the kitchen, to the sofa, in various combinations. He had arranged for a regular food delivery and used his dwindling trust fund, and the occasional bit of help from a confounded Mycroft, to keep his life going on the bare minimum.

Someone cruel would have simply stated that the impact of Sherlock realizing he had been wrong had been so powerful, that it took the life out of him. Sherlock was no longer sure if he’d stop himself from killing a person who would entertain such a thought.


End file.
